He makes most of the money now from persuading others starting a passive income side gig, for which he coincidentally has a starter pack to sale. While this might be a reliable income, it is in no means a template for other people to start a successful passive income business with a working business idea.
For a minority % for whom Django is the tech-choice, there indeed is a product being offered.
But for them, and the majority who might not choose Django, there is enough general-purpose advise in this essay.
Everything is meta.
Even a shower, a clean shave, and a well-tailored outfit can be classified as marketing / lead-gen / sales.
As can brushing your teeth :)
If you read my writing[1], it will be clear that I've been documenting my journey in a probably-too-transparent way long before I had a product that benefited from getting exposure to other developers. This talk is mostly just a distillation of that knowledge, because I have graduated from "idiot figuring it out" to "experienced person who may be able to say something useful for beginners".
Also, for the record, I hate that starter kits became one of the trendy (and sleazy) products in this space, exactly because it generates reactions like this. I wrote about this last month[2], saying "They make the whole industry look bad, and make me feel like a grifter selling Pegasus, even though I have worked my ass off on it for 5+ years and think it’s great. Maybe a corollary to this point is that I kind of don’t like marketing in my industry anymore?"
Again, I think it's a fair general critique and a correct reaction to this type of advice, and also I hope that I didn't really do what you said if you read or watch the contents of the talk.
1. https://www.coryzue.com/writing/ 2. https://www.coryzue.com/writing/dec-2024/
That’s what I call a grift. Your description reminded me of Dan Olson’s fantastic video on that type of strategy—where you make money by selling the idea that anyone can make passive income by doing something the seller doesn’t themselves do (anymore)—using the Mikkelsen Twins as the example.
In Dan’s words (emphasis mine), the Mikkelsen Twins aren’t special, grifters like them are a dime a dozen. He chose them as the example “because they are of a type. They are a representative sample of a category of grift. And also because they’re kind of incompetent and that makes them entertaining”.
He’s not wrong.
I can recall online versions in 2012 - that I’m ashamed to say took me for some money - were not just in existence but popular and fashionable the way indie hackers is now. Nothing new.
I'm talking about the specific SaaS starter kit trend of recent and that Cory's work predates it - specifically because of snark like yours, which has seen an uptick because of the recent trend.
I say this because, at first blush, I was glad that a bunch of the products he listed that he built seemed generally like real products that I could imagine people finding useful. I say this because it feels like, in contrast, so often in these solopreneur posts they're selling some kind of scammy SEO or ad-spam tool.
So yeah, I'd be bummed if this guy turned out to be the tech equivalent of "Buy my real estate investing course!", and just curious if that's really what this is.
Edit: Nevermind, I saw https://www.coryzue.com/open/.
I immediately thought about Robert Kiyosaki, author of 'rich dad poor dad' I was eagerly reading as student. I later came to realize Robert converted to making money by selling his story and advice (and 'rat race' game :] which I also purchased! )
it is when the working idea is to sell a template for other people to start a successful passive income business
The immortal grifter Tai Lopez lives on.
I’m a lot more proud of bookshelf you see.
First you have to make space in your life for it. You need long blocks of time for deep work.
The first idea you pick is unlikely to work, so pick something and start moving. Many of the best products come out of working on something else.
When building, optimize for speed. Try to get something out in the world as quickly as possible and iterate from there.
Pick a tech stack you're familiar with, that you'll be fastest in.
Try to spend half your time on marketing/sales, even if you hate it.
The most important skill you can have is resiliance. Not giving up is the best path to success. This is hard because there is so much uncertainty in this career path.
It's worth it! The autonomy and freedom are unmatched by any other career.
Actual passive income is living off the returns and royalties from assets, doing nothing but managing those assets (or maybe not even doing that).
It reminds me of people that consider buying a second home and rent out the old one to gain “passive income”, not realizing how much work it can be to be a good landlord.
I have ETFs and a HYSA that I basically never look at. That’s passive.
Unlike when I was younger I can't just stay up coding until 3AM anymore. In fact I find myself without the mental energy after work that I want to put into my projects, so evenings are out completely for me.
So instead I wake up at 5AM and put myself into it before work. It was a big adjustment, but all I needed to do while acclimating to that schedule was ask myself each morning which I wanted more: warm blankets or a successful project? Now it's a pretty energizing way to start the day.
I choose warm blankets lying next to my warm wife where my heat and shelter is paid by exchanging my labor for money 40 hours a week, paid time off, paid health care, etc
And if you fail, it’s your own fault, you just didn’t want it enough, you didn’t do the necessary sacrifices.
I didn’t call it bad, I called it bland, generic, and worthless. Like telling people they should eat healthily and exercise. It’s not wrong or bad, but it’s also not something you haven’t heard hundreds of times before and doesn’t really help you much.
Can we agree that it is, at core, gambling? Like spending all your disposable income on lottery tickets?
Yes. Can we also agree that advising people to spend all of their disposable income on gambling is bad advice to make money? I think you’re agreeing with the post you replied to.
Is that what you call success?
Different people have different goals.
Out of mind numbing boredom I made a system for SEO spam websites during this time. I would take expiring domain names (so names someone had gone to the trouble to research but been unable to make work) parse out keywords and lookup popularity for them, lookup ad rates for them, and spit out names to buy and make a SEO spam site for (goal was 300 websites making $1 a day or $100k a year), or good names to domain squat. If a domain turned out bunk I threw my link-spam-network software on it to provide linkbacks to my money/new sites. I made around 30k profit a year plus another $5k selling domain names doing this before life fell further apart and it rotted on the vine. I was really tempted to sell it as a package but could never bring myself that low even deep in addiction. Plus Google started cracking down on that trash.
I still think the concept of 300 somethings (though please not SEO spam) that make a dollar a day is viable for us here though because we're in the unique position where the creation/maintenance is just a matter of our spare time since we can do the specs/design/coding/administration/maintenance/etc ourselves. It seems like there are still people doing this. Look at new car model forums. Everytime a new car models is released there's a rush to create discussion forums for that model with people hoping Google blesses theirs so they can add it to their portfolio of money maker car model forums. Maybe the secret sauce is forcing yourself to watch reality TV until your mind rebels and says 'fine, grab me the laptop and we'll make mind numbingly boring software products as that is at least better than watching this'.
Edit: To clarify this wasn't my income source this was just what I did while being forced to watch 'The Kardashians' for bonding time.
And I'm not sure it beats, e.g., work hard and save hard at tech company for a decade, then use the invested surplus as passive income to work lightly thereafter. At least, not in the general case.
I used an LLM to help me do the math but it appears you would have to make $1.5 million/year at "tech company" if you were to save 20% of your income and have $4 million saved after 10 years. That $4mm saved would allow you to appreciate to $5mm to retire on after 20 years while simultaneously withdrawing $150,000/year in passive income to live on.
Of course you can adjust this based on how aggressively you save, how much you need to withdraw each year, and how much runway you have until retirement and how much retirement you need to be comfortable.
Regardless, what you're suggesting is available only to the privileged few who can get extremely high-paying jobs early in their careers and hold onto them while having low enough expenses and high enough discipline to save aggressively.
OP's approach is a very doable path for folks who aren't so fortunate and/or young, but can code, have some life experience, and don't want to go get another job.
- Very few people earn $1.5M/year
- Saving 20% implies that you're spending ~$1M/year while working, so $150k/year in retirement would not be appealing
Did the LLM pick the numbers for you?
Of course very few people earn $1.5M/year. That's my point -- the poster I was replying to was naively thinking they could just work hard for a tech company and save for 10 years and then live off the passive income of the saved investment, which is silly.
The rest of the numbers were conservative figures I chose. $5mm to retire, 20% saved while working, $150k/year passive income. The whole point is that what he's describing is pretty unrealistic.
How did you choose "20% saved while working" as a number? Why not 80%?
I mean, you’d be terrorizing the economy, but that’s also what you do when you eat food grown and prepared by people with inadequate labor protections, so why not take the red pill and double down on being a true slave-supported neo-Athenian?
Let's run a different scenario: your post-tax income is $200k and you save half of that. In 11 years, you can retire and get $100k per year at a 4% withdrawal rate.
People in either of these scenarios are obviously privileged, but the latter isn't unrealistic for a single FAANG dev.
engaging-data.com has cool fire calculators. Highly recommend checking them out
- income: tech sector salary median
- spending: median spending + 25%
- passive income target: median net income
Now add some indie project income as a topping.
If you're not very close to passive income after ten years, you're doing it wrong. If you're not financially responsible for lots of people, that is.
The text-based tech internet has become incredibly hostile to people sharing their work over the past decade, so a few years ago I decided to try and engage people through YouTube instead and I think this has been a decision that has really paid off. For people interested in pursuing something like this I'd definitely recommend trying out video format communication over blog posts and articles if the latter aren't doing well for you.
I have done a lot of "building in public" on YouTube over the past few years and have built up a really solid product that people have been actively asking me to release a commercial license for so that they can use it at work. I feel pretty good about things right now!
Getting from 0 to 1 is the hardest part, and you're at 6 already. I hope you keep at it, for years, and see monotonically increasing numbers. Doing something like this (sustainably) would be fantastic success.
Best of luck!
It's weird, I've found it really ticks my brain into productivity mode.
There is a slight something to ignoring it when there's a person on the other side, even if it is a perfect stranger that I will never see again
I guess it's an ego thing. But not fully though is it? Earning a couple of years of FAANG money opens one up to then just travel the world. I'm from the EU but will make the switch to the US in about a year from now (marriage). So from that perspective, I just don't know if it's strategic. When you have $300K in the bank and you just go to SE asia, you also have "no schedule" etc.
That should be doable with FAANG. I do feel this path delivers more impact though as life becomes a bit more like a game and you're creating your own quests. You're solving things that you are quick enough at to solve but also things that you find important or just simply fun.
Man, I'm torn. Both take quite a bit of a time investment. I'm not sure how I can monetize a "leetcode with me" type of thing. If there was still a market for that, I might do that to start both things off at the same time. Maybe I should just become a Twitch streamer :') But I don't think that'd pay off. I guess it wouldn't hurt to try.
I could see justifying a trip like that on a cost-of-living basis. If you go to a place like Thailand, you are going to be spending pennies on the dollar vs. the EU, even after paying incredible amounts (in local currency) for first-world conveniences like clean drinking water and internet. So in that sense if you are going to be coding and living life online, you might as well live someplace cheap IRL. But that's different from a tourist crawl where you are just spending money like water, which maybe was more your idea.
Based on past history, now is not the time to shoot for the stars, but to start consolidating your base and preparing for the next upturn.
Prepare how? I fled to be a data analyst. For multiple reasons. One: the job interview was a cake walk (for me at least). I was unprepared and I aced it despite not really knowing what a data analyst was. It helps that I have a fairly good statistics background from back in the day. I'm also better paid since they don't pay software engineers that well in the Netherlands, so data analyst salaries seem more competitive locally.
But yea, I'd be curious what you specifically mean by it.
I think some people would not be comfortable with this and rather take a steady paycheck from Big Corp while working on 1-2 darling projects at home.
That said, I totally agree that some people would rather keep the steady paycheck. The career is a large up-front investment with a variable outcome. But, it's not as hard as it can be made out to be, and the payoff, if successful, is immense.
Shit sounds like tedium or uncomfortable or whatever to some, but I know multiple millionaires on this tip.
It’s been awhile since I had a job where I was responsible for hiring staff augmentation “consultants”. But the hourly rate that they got was shit.
On the other hand, if you have the background, skillset, network, etc to be a highly paid strategic consultant who knows how to talk to the “business” and bring in a specialized skillset, you don’t need side income to have the freedom that you want. You can charge a high enough hourly rate that you can already basically set your own schedule.
I fall into the latter category. But I choose to work full time for consulting companies because they take care of all of the headaches.
This is the obstacle to EVERYTHING in my life. It's very chaotic, which causes a lot of stress and has led to decreasing performance.
I try so hard to clean up, to improve things. To try to proactively get ahead of stuff. It never seems to be enough. Something happens I cannot prepare for, or in trying to save and be efficient something goes wrong I cannot afford. My whole plan, saving AND getting things done has now blown up. I no longer have one, I now have three problems and I have also lost/wasted a day. Tomorrow I have four problems, plus I am aware of this dynamic and unable to escape it so technically 5?
This compounds over time.
How do you escape this failure loop?
tl;dr: the "being poor is expensive" trap, how escape when so burned out you are struggling to tread water?
It's not just money, it's attention span. It's the ability to set my mind to something and accomplish what I set out. Having that muscle atrophy and tear has been traumatic and I am struggling to find emotional or medical interventions worth the effort.
I think you are onto something here, but there's no way to keep my current situation sustainable let alone live on less. The financial thing I can't do much about but the psychological maybe. It's hard when I feel like there is nobody to help me and I have to do everything alone.
Beyond this very specific thing, I think its also a struggle with trusting myself. I don't trust myself to finish anything. I can try as hard as I want but my locus of control is completely external. I am tired of being lied to about agency and ability. If it was easy as putting effort in I'd be there already.
So I work harder and harder in an effort to MAYBE be enough for society / work etc and I am STILL not enough. How can you believe in yourself when you are the source of all failure, lack of consistency, inability to change or adapt. It's me. I'm the problem. I try to be better but at some point I am just masking who I am, which is a WHOLE other problem that is not mutually exclusive. It's another one of those "can't follow the issue because it's too complicated" problems that's destroying my life. Nobody undertands, everyone tells me I'm not alone (they are wrong) and nobdody has any reasonable or actionable suggestions because nobody I have talked to yet even remotely grasps what I am going through. My therapist is really the only person who gets it.
So many times I have tried to do the "right" thing only for it to backfire and make everything worse. It's textbook learned helplessness, but I also have a proverbial textbook of evidence to support my reasons why things won't work. Nobody will listen to me, and then when the thing I tell them won't work FAILS it's my fault for pointing out the laws of physics or nature. I am tired of being the scapegoat for sociopaths and Machiavellian cancer.
I accept that I need to accept failure. I am trying, but it's demoralizing and only seems to cause pain not growth. I can usually maintain optimism for a week or more but inevitably the reality of life creeps back in and I can't lie to myself any longer.
Edit: Just saw your other response. Now is certainly not the right time to push yourself, which is fine. Hope you'll get out of that hole soon, best of luck!
I’m speaking for myself of course, but maybe it’s not about accepting the failure itself, but accepting that failure or disappointment is a learning opportunity providing feedback. Failure is a strong term while in reality results are somewhere between success and failure, and recognizing it is not a binary. Usually there are successes and failures in a project with the key observation being what you as an individual can do to improve the environment (e.g. avoiding sociopathic, coworkers, Machiavellian corporate practices, poor work environments, etc). Anyway, I apologize if my attempt to understand is off the mark and wish you luck navigating to an endeavor where you can find more satisfaction.
But is this really still possible in todays world?
Isn't there competition from the thousands of software devs laid off in last couple years. They can all make apps.
Just like the Flappy Bird guy. Sure, it was big hit, but so easy to have a hundred knock offs within a week.
I have four products that make money, built over the course of seven years. None of them really benefit from each other. If it was pure luck and 1/1,000 chance of success I don't think my current portfolio would be possible. (I also have a lot of failures, so I agree there's luck and risk, just not as strong as you're making it out to be)
They're also not a cross-domain expert at the same things you are. You might be in the top N coders in a niche, and you might be the only one with the motivation to work on the problem.
You also might just do it better than them.
And last, you might just split the pie with them. Really, it's okay to have many apps doing the same thing with different approaches.
In a pre-app world, I wrote some blogs with ads.
Some of my favourite ones were dumb but fairly evergreen articles where I had domain knowledge like “best directions to the dmv offices in $mytown”. (Pro-tip: it’s upstairs at the XYZ shopping mall, but if you park by the pizza place, you’ll be at the doors that take you straight there)
Reliable and consistent income.
Not a ton, but more like a bond than a stock.
It's one thing to be a good dev/coder, but another level entierly to be a one man team delivering a product.
Being able to make apps isn't enough. You also have to develop a broad set of skills to complement that.
They could, but most likely they are doom scrolling while saying things like "Isn't there competition from the thousands of software devs laid off in last couple years. They can all make apps."
:)
How many apps we can point to that are huge today, are really not that complicated, and any number of people 'could have' built them.
I doubt the creator minds too much, I know I wouldn't: he still made millions off it.
My skills are more in algorithm development (statistical signal processing, machine learning) and electronics than web coding though, so it’s probably not as easy as just making a simple website that does something slightly useful.
I recently ran across advice here to just copy an existing successful idea and compete on e.g., price, rather than wasting time trying to come up with something novel / innovative. The argument is that if the idea is successful, then most of the market legwork has been done for you already.
I'm considering entertaining it. I last seriously did WWW-related work in 2001 or so, but Python with FastAPI + HTMX + Bulma CSS looks easy enough to spin-up on and maps pretty well to my now-ancient understanding of the web.
Copying and undercutting someone else is certainly easier!
I'm below those rungs. So I'm quitting my job to go "all in" on the consulting. (But I've been prepping and will make sure things line up so I can hit the ground running.)
All of this is to say, I think that transition either during or after salary work is the super important part that I see everyone gloss over.
My goal is to make a fraction of my salary with consulting for the first couple years, focus just on that, and eventually shift my focus to software products.
With work, they're fed to you (at volume!).
Don't underestimate the opportunity cost of any decision. Right now with such broad tech+business awareness, being at the right place at the right time is pretty much your only differentiator.
So perhaps consulting will lead organically to the best opportunity, but often opportunity is gated by access to a good team, reasonable infrastructure, and most importantly good customers with leading-edge problems.
10 years ago, when I was chasing this - I'd look for proven business models. Find some small startup / company that sells some software or service, try to figure out what they did and how they did it, then spend time getting into the domain, tech, and what have you. It was a lot of work, and took time.
If I do it now, I have the luxury of simply asking my LLM of choice to give me a run-down, and what I need to do. Hell, I've even experimented and gotten a LLM to dish up a working MVP in a single day, which I can iterate on.
People spend time chasing novel problems, or coming up with solutions that are looking for problems - when in reality the vast majority of business and entrepreneurship comes down to looking for tested/validated business problems, looking at the existing solutions, and finding ways to enter that market, and win/siphon customers.
Congrats on living the dream, I tried, failed at that 5 years ago ("maybe i can just sell my coding directly...") though I probably gave up too quickly.
Nice article!
Oh man... Ouch! First time I'm hearing it put that way!! As far as I knew, the contract was done before I left town! :)
But that absolutely, to a T, sounds like (a distorted version of...) *exactly* the sort of miscommunication I'd get into 20 years ago.
Glad to hear some version of my youthful exploits turned into tales, even if I have to be the "heel". :)
bows
EDIT: of course unless it's the robots that do all the work, but then it's not really passive...